Second Generation

Steven Deng, a lanky sixteen-year-old high-school student from Shanghai, was full of questions during a recent visit to New York: Why are there so many Spanish people in America? What can you tell me about the iPhone4? What do the American people think about the diplomatic policy of Obama? Is American football more popular than baseball? What is the maximum number of children allowed each family by the government? How many children will you have? One boy and one girl, or both boys? “You know, in China, we totally don’t care about these things,” he explained over dinner at Planet Hollywood, in Times Square. “Or, if you care, you actually don’t know. You can’t obtain this kind of information. I’m in America now. So I can ask about this.”

Steven is a member of the fu er dai, or “second-generation rich”—the children of China’s political élite and of its first real entrepreneurial class. His parents make chocolate and, with the proceeds, invest in Australian real estate. He sometimes worries that they are more consumed with their business interests than with him, their only child. Much of the Chinese middle class, meanwhile, worries that Steven and his peers are spoiled and unserious, and are unprepared to take over their families’ companies. What they need, everyone seems to agree, is some worldliness, and this has given rise to a flourishing supplementary-education industry. Steven and eight classmates were here on a two-week “college and culture tour,” as one of their chaperons put it, organized by a Shanghai-based company called Education Consulting International. They’d been travelling down the East Coast in a white bus with rainbow detailing. It was Day 10, and they had already visited Harvard, M.I.T., Yale, N.Y.U., and Columbia, with Princeton and a private White House tour still to follow. Steven, who had been quiet at the beginning of the trip, seemed energized by the hip-hop dance class they had just completed at Alvin Ailey, and was suddenly talkative.

“New York is really—I think it’s better than Shanghai,” he said, after choosing the vegetarian option from the restaurant’s “Lights, Camera, Action” menu. “Maybe some places are not so clean”—the students were all unimpressed with Chinatown—“but it gives a sense of the metropolitan. Shanghai, I think, is also metropolitan, but still in development.” Fifth Avenue, or “the fifth street,” as Steven called it, was the consensus high point thus far, although he and his classmates hadn’t been given much time to shop, and had spent part of each of the previous two mornings volunteering (reluctantly) at soup kitchens instead. Steven had bought himself a Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt, and at the Empire State Building he picked up a cigarette lighter, as a souvenir for his grandfather. “In China, smoking and drinking are the two problems of a man,” he said. “Many social phenomena in China are not exposed. The government always impresses, like, ‘Everything’s good, everything will be better.’ ” He described a daily ritual on the state-sponsored news back home, an infomercial purporting to show the benefits of urbanization: “Every day, you expect maybe five minutes to describe a farmer. The farmer in the nineteen-nineties, he has nothing to do. In the two-thousands, he has maybe one million yuan, and nowadays, in 2010, he is a great businessman.” The reality, he said, was more complicated: “Every day, there are many teen-agers drinking and smoking.” His own classmates were apparently not among them. “My high school is a pretty good school in China,” he said. “The Shanghai Foreign Language School. Maybe you have heard in America?”

The group had tickets to see “Wicked,” on Broadway, but first a waitress wanted to know if anyone was interested in trying some of “New York’s famous cheesecake.” Steven accepted a piece. “Americans have a way of taking a good thing and adding to it,” he said, referring to the strawberry glaze on top. “The cheese part, at least, is very nice.” Leaving the restaurant, the students passed a statue of Sylvester Stallone dressed as Rocky Balboa. (“Rambo,” one of the chaperons observed. “ ‘First Blood’!”)

“What do Americans talk about when they have dinner?” Steven asked, heading north on Seventh Avenue, in the direction of the theatre. “In China, it’s politics, and maybe the price of the buildings in Shanghai. It’s really expensive.” He added, “The location is everything.” Some cultural wisdom is universal. Soon the group passed an establishment that advertised itself as a gentlemen’s club, and one of Steven’s classmates pointed and said, “Oh, I know: prostitute!” ♦

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